A visible light communication technology is a brand-new wireless communication technology that has sprung up in recent years. A communication function is integrated with illumination of a light source such that the light source can not only implement an illumination function, but can also implement a communication function. Compared with conventional radio frequency communication technologies and any other wireless optical communication technologies, the visible light communication technology has advantages such as high transmit power, no occupation of a radio frequency spectrum, no electromagnetic interference, and no electromagnetic radiation, energy conservation. Therefore, the visible light communication technology has become increasingly important.
Currently, application researches of the visible light communication technology mainly focus on an indoor visible light communication system and an outdoor visible light intelligent transportation system. The visible light communication system can not only provide a light source position signal for indoor positioning, but also has relatively high positioning precision. Therefore, when used indoors, the visible light communication system is generally used for positioning in order to determine a current position of a user. For example, when a user A is in a shopping mall but does not know information about a name of the shopping mall, information about a serial number of a floor on which the user A is, or information about a specific address of the shopping mall, the user A can determine, using the visible light communication system, the information about the name, the information about the floor serial number, the information about the specific address, and the like of the shopping mall in which the user A is.
In the prior art, as shown in FIG. 1, the visible light communication system includes four parts a visible light source, an optical receiver having a short-range wireless communication function, a mobile terminal, and a map server. Steps of a process of implementing positioning are as follows.
Step 10: The visible light source adds a signal that includes at least geographical position coding information of the visible light source into visible light and transmits the visible light to the optical receiver.
Step 11: The optical receiver sends the received signal that includes the geographical position coding information of the visible light source to the mobile terminal.
Step 12: The mobile terminal parses out information about a current geographical position according to the received signal.
However, the prior art has the following defects.
It is required to use an optical receiver as a signal receiving apparatus between a mobile terminal and a visible light source such that the optical receiver sends a received signal that includes geographical position coding information of the visible light source to the mobile terminal. Therefore, a problem that a positioning process is relatively complex exists.